Day 65 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 14 (2014 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 14

Juliet watched her ex fiancé die on a loop, over and over again, unsure if what she was seeing was truth or faked. The internet was awash with conspiracy theories about whether or not the game was even real, and she could not tell by looking at the video footage, not even the high definition version she had her lawyer download and put on her big screen TV for her to see in all it's gory detail.

In the past couple of weeks she had a roller coaster ride of emotions. It had been less than a year since her parents had died, along with her fiancé, who had killed them quite deliberately, caught on camera doing so and shown up for the whole world to see. She had not seen anything in him until that point and she had a hard time processing the changes in her world. She had been seeing three different therapists, taking a mix of different medications, drinking more than she should given her delicate frame of mind and revising all her memories in light of what she had seen and what she now knew.

It had taken her this long to not wake up and wonder if it had been a dream, and today was the day she actually woke up to reality. She inherited everything that he had planned for himself, or that's what the various police, lawyers and reporters told her his plan was. It made no sense to her even now, she would have given it all to him, he could have had whatever he wanted, he did get whatever he wanted all the time. Why did he have to kill her parents? Was he planning on killing her too?

Her lawyer certainly thought so and spent no small amount of time disabusing her of any notion of Jacksons innocence. At first they had spared her the medical details of the rape and abuse her put her poor mother through before stabbing her repeatedly, furious and enraged to all accounts. Ultimately they could not shield her from the press accounts of the crimes he had committed, and some sanitised crime scene reports and photos were leaked, or sold, to the national media and they made for grim reading, even after the heavy editing. She did not want to know the level of detail that the police held back, she did not want to see the mutilation in any way, shape or form but every time she turned on the television or came to a news site there were descriptions screaming at her brutally from the headlines.

She felt assaulted by it all and going in public was equally painful and distracting to her. The way people looked at her, gave their incessant sympathy and pointed out how much they could not believe that a person could do something so violent and evil, this was as oppressive as the initial shock of losing the three closest and most important people to her in her life in one night. She had a panic attack out in public one day when she thought she saw Jackson staring at her from across a busy street, she had blanched and screamed in terror at the sight of him, the fear and loathing in his eyes scared the living daylights out of her. When she stopped screaming she could not see him, realised that it was impossible, it was memory and grief lying to her, and her willing to believe.

Now though, it looked like it was possible and it could have been him. He could had made good his escape, and he could have survived the blaze that inflicted further damage to the bodies of her parents and took away her soon to be husband along with the house she grew up in. It was his body that was most damaged, in the very core of the fire, and the one that was now in question. DNA was of no use, it matched no one of records and now that the identity was in doubt they were combing through old records and some keepsakes that survived the culling of his previous life, when he came to inherit hers. His mother, refused to believe any of the stories the police and press told, she accused them of faking the footage, paying off the witnesses and then murdering her framed son to cover their crimes. She crossed the line from disturbed by the death of her husband and the abandonment of her only child to a peculiar madness born of denial that somehow gave her resolve and strength that she never had before.

Juliet did not know what to do, whether or not she should take care of this deranged woman as the mother of her fiancé, her ex-fiancé, or abandon her to her fate for her son's role in her parents death. Logically she should have nothing to do with her, but emotionally it felt like they were sharing the pain of his deceit and his borderline psychopathy that affected them both in different ways. Where Juliet was calm and eventually accepting, Mrs Jones was paranoid and delusional, but sadly Juliet could understand why and far from wanting to cut her off, she felt a need to embrace and restore her as the only thing close to a family she had left.

Her lawyers kept advising her to steer clear, to let sleeping dogs lie and not to give support to a woman who was trying to sue her parents estate for the wrongful death of her son. The suit was never going to fly, but she got mileage in the press, even when they were openly mocking her pain and madness over the blatant guilt of her son.

Then Darwin's Game aired and their lives were turned upside down once again. Juliet did not see episode 1 until a reporter called at her house, got past the security she had guarding the house for this very reason, and pinned her down and brought her up to speed. She got rid of the reporter, had them seen off and showed no reaction to the news that he ex was mysteriously alive, but in the most bizarre and unexplained of circumstances. She downloaded the episode from Facts Alone, a few days before the second episode went online.

She watched it horrified and confused. Was this real? How could this be real? She was on the phone to her lawyer to ask for an explanation, he had seen it and had known and had been debating whether or not to let her know. He had been cooperating with the authorities investigating the participants as best he could and he was not sure that involving Juliet would be in the best interest of her continued mental health. Calls from Mrs Jones had intensified and the pressure on the security at the new home was intense, and the guard doubled without her being made aware. As that first week wore on he came to see that it was not going to go away and that everyone was now watching and following this Game. He would have to tell her about it, somehow. Before he came to figure out how and when he could broach the subject though, that decision was taken away from him as one of the team of reporters assaulting the security at the house that day got through.

She knew it was him immediately, they had been intimate for long enough for her to know him when she saw him. There was not a burn mark visible, and short of magic that meant that he had never been in the fire and that someone else, some poor unfortunate and unidentified soul lay in that grave marked Jackson Jones III. She watched him in the group of that first video, fascinated and not wanting to believe but trusting what she simply knew to be true, he was still alive.

The second episode was very bad for her, she saw him at the centre of it, he was very close to becoming the victim in that scenario and she saw in him in full action working the others around the table. That was the hard part, not the threat to his life, by rights she already thought he was dead, and had accepted that at the very least he deserved to be, but that she could see him manipulate the others or trying to do so. She saw now what she had not seen while he had been alive, alive in her world that was, as he was still alive and on her screen. She saw that flash of anger, that subtle gestures and convincing demeanour without any words and she finally saw it for what it actually was. She was bereft of her innocence once more as the full weight of what he had done clicked into place and made some sense, where she had a feeling and evidence before but no knowledge and no connection, now it was irrefutable and it felt right. It felt like he was capable and she could see him working the room to get his way in a familiar manner but one she had never seen in this light.

She did not leave the house at all, she avoided the calls that were being screened by the lawyer and when the federal authorities questioned her, they did so in her home under tight, secure and very private conditions. She asked about Mrs Jones, but no one had seen her, she had gone quiet since the surfacing of the game and the reappearance of her son.

Then the last episode came, or the last one that held any interest for her anyway, the third and the one where Jackson died at the end, ripped open by a knife not unlike the way that he had taken her mother, though more merciful in speed and without any evil intent to inflict suffering and humiliation. She watched it again and again and asked he people to get the video examined for forgery and effects, knowing full well it would be absolute and true regardless.

She watched the life go out of his eyes, the shock at losing it all, the surprise of having the tables turned on him and the rapid descent into death. The blood did not shock her, the death did nothing to act as a catharsis. The death was a fact, and it piled on top of many others up until this point. He had murdered her parents, he was lying and manipulating his way to the fortune that he could have had legitimately if he was patient.

She didn't know what to do next, she worried about Mrs Jones, no one knew where she was and that scared her, how far would her madness extend? She did not fear for retribution or revenge, she feared that Mrs Jones would harm herself or go further down a road of madness over the public execution of her son.

Commentators talked all about the game changing nature of this latest episode, how that the obvious victim was not necessarily the one who would die. How the director, presumably Darwin himself, tricked the audience into thinking that Vargas would die only to turn the tables and present the episode more dramatically. The ethics of this approach were highly suspect they said, how could they know if this was not staged or set up in some way? Or could it be that this truly was a survival of the fittest based game and anyone had the capacity to be the fittest, like Vargas who overcame and adapted to the changes in his environment, evolved to meet the needs of survival.

Juliet did not know or care about those concerns, Jackson Jones III was definitely dead this time, it was right there, unambiguous and final. She felt no relief or regret, no weight was lifted off of her and no closure was forthcoming. It was a fact, and facts were all that mattered now.